MATTERS OF FACT/MATTERS OF FICTION: IMAGINING AND IMPLEMENTING INSTITUTIONAL
CHANGE

Proposal for a special issue of Culture and Organization

Simon Lilley
(University of Leicester School of Management – [log in to unmask])
and
Alan McKinlay
(School of Management, University of St Andrews - [log in to unmask])

How do we imagine change in a world of facts? If we accept, with
Castoriadis, that we live within institutions of society which are
essentially imaginary - and we further accept that in order to participate
these institutions must be treated as extant and real and not be immediately
and endlessly re-imagined – when and how do we imagine and implement change?
This is the question that the special issue seeks to address. And we might
find answers through attending to the relationships between the reading and
writing of facts and the reading and writing of fiction.

Recent scholarship in Management and Organization Studies is now more and
more attentive to literary sources in its attempts to illuminate its subject
matter (eg, Czarniawska, 2006, 2008), whilst ethnographic writing in the
field is increasingly seen to mimic the novel in its modes of scene setting
and narration (eg, Bate, 1997). Meanwhile, social history has been
re-thought by, amongst others, Catherine Gallagher (1985, 2006) and Mary
Poovey (1995). Rather than treat, say, public health reports as proxies for
the ‘real’, these texts are analysed in terms of the categories they develop
and deploy to understand and act upon the social world.  So Gallagher (2006)
traces conceptions of the body in the Victorian novel and political economy,
whereas Poovey examines the construction of social populations in economic
and public policy documents. Alongside these developments, both within our
field and beyond, long overdue texts have been appearing that seek to
problematise, explore and work the fragile seam between the fictional and
the social scientific (see, for example, De Cock and Land, 2006; Watson,
2000). And perhaps an even more urgent need is to question the simplicity of
the models of reading texts and the assumed virtue of so doing that
characterize some of the social science scholarship in which fiction is
mobilized (see, for example, DeVault, 1990; Walder, 1996; Jones, 2003; and
McGrath, 2005).

We invite contributors to utilize these overlapping concerns to read key
texts that inform our organizing and our making and remaking of our
institutions. We have in mind those cultural productions that either present
in factual form apparently fictional accounts or present in fictional form
apparently factual accounts. Examples of the former might include Defoe’s A
Journal of the Plague Year or, in more contemporary vein, the
‘documentaries’ of Michael Moore. They might also include the public health
reports, to which Poovey (1995) attends, through which categories for
appropriating and acting upon ‘populations’ are imagined and instantiated.
Examples of the latter might include Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or De Lillo’s
Libra. Such texts  offer a different way into elaborating, qualifying and
further interrogating the relationship between fact, fiction and organization.

In essence then, this call invites reflection upon the stability of the
categories of fact and fiction and the relationship of that stability to
differing contexts, times and conditions of reading. Reversing this, the
question becomes how certain conditions of reading themselves stabilise, or
destabilise, texts. Themes to be addressed include, but would certainly not
be limited to, the following:

the literary conventions of realist accounts of management and organization
(be they fictional, administrative or social scientific in their purported
domain of origin);

rhetorical styles in ethnographic stories about managing and being managed,
organizing and being organized (be they fictional, administrative or social
scientific in their purported domain of origin);
 
the narratives devised by interlocutors to connect grand social and
political rhetorics and everyday life;
 
the implicit social narratives of politics, economics and organization;

the literary styles of social and organizational theorists;
 

fictional writing as a template for innovative theory and practice;
 

the emergence of collective and/or invisible authorship – the sympathies
between the death of the author and instantiation of depersonalised ‘facts’
from the realm of opinion
 
Practicalities of participation

The editors of the special issue would welcome full papers for consideration
for the special issue by 1st October 2008. All papers will be subject to the
journal’s normal double blind reviewing process.
References

Bate, P. 1997. Whatever happened to organizational anthropology? A review of
the field of organizational ethnography and anthropological studies. Human
Relations 50, no. 9: 1147–1175.

Castoriadis, C. 1997 The Imaginary Institution of Society. Trans. K. Blamey.
 Cambridge: Polity Press.

Czarniawska, B. 2006. Doing gender unto the other: fiction as a mode of
studying gender discrimination in organizations. Gender, Work and
Organization 13, no. 3: 234-253.

Czarniawska, B. 2008. Femmes fatales in finance, or women and the city.
Organization 15, no. 2: 165-186.

De Cock, C. and Land, C. 2006. Organization/literature: exploring the seam.
Organization Studies 27, no. 4: 517-535.

DeVault, M. 1990. Novel readings: the social organization of interpretation.
The American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 4: 887-921.

Gallagher, C. 1985. The Industrial Revolution of English Fiction: Social
Discourse and Narrative Form, 1932-1867. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gallagher, C. 2006. The Body, Economic Life, Death & Sensation in Political
Economy of the Victorian Novel, Princeton, NI: Princeton University Press.

Jones, C.. 2003. Resistances of Organization Studies.  PhD Thesis, Keele
University.

McGrath, T. 2005. Shakespeare and Management: A Study in Cultural
Appropriation. PhD Thesis, University of Leicester.

Poovey, M. 1995. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation,
1830-1864. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rose, D. 1990. Living the Ethnographic Life. London: Sage.

Walder, D. (ed.). 1996 The Realist Novel. London: Routledge.